Preneur Marketing Bloghttp://preneurmarketing.com
The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete WilliamsFri, 06 Jul 2018 07:27:54 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8How I Sold $58,000 Last Year Selling Just Gift Cards for the Day Spahttp://preneurmarketing.com/business-building/how-i-sold-58000-last-year-selling-just-gift-cards-for-the-day-spa/
http://preneurmarketing.com/business-building/how-i-sold-58000-last-year-selling-just-gift-cards-for-the-day-spa/#respondTue, 22 Aug 2017 09:55:18 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12723Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Robert Norberciak, Marketing Director at the Scottsdale, Arizona day spa, Mozaik Skin & Body, and one of the founders at Service Business Hustlers. People love shopping local. Even more so, people love buying gifts that are local. They want to treat their friends to amazing experiences at local businesses. With my day spa, I don’t sell anything online except for gift cards. I don’t try to compete with e-commerce stores. I simply focus on the one thing that no one else does in my market well. I focus on making it easy for my

People love shopping local. Even more so, people love buying gifts that are local. They want to treat their friends to amazing experiences at local businesses.

With my day spa, I don’t sell anything online except for gift cards. I don’t try to compete with e-commerce stores. I simply focus on the one thing that no one else does in my market well. I focus on making it easy for my customers to buy gift cards.

I had the joy on Mother’s Day to watch a family go into my competitor. They asked if they sold gift cards. The lady was like “No”.

They came over to my spa and walked out with $300 in gift cards that they bought for their mother. Guess who got the new customer?

Each year, I sell close to ~$23,000 of gift cards just online. We sell another $25-35k in-store.

I’m going to break down for you my exact strategy on how I am selling so many gift cards through my website and in-store.

Stop Offering Just Plain Dollar Amounts

If someone is going through the trouble of buying a gift card from a local business — they don’t want to go the easy route and buy them just a gift card. They want to buy them something special. In fact, I have attached a log of all my recent gift card purchases.

Where you see “-”, the customer selected a dollar amount. In fact, 19 out of my last 26 purchases of gift cards have been for packages. People love treating someone to something unique. It’s a win-win for everyone.

The person buying feels like they are treating someone to something special. When the recipient gets the gift card, they enjoy it a lot. They feel someone really put an effort into the purchase.

Do you know what the cool part about selling an experience is?

When that new customer comes with that gift card — they get a full experience from your place. If you give them an award-winning experience, then they’ll love your place forever.

For example, a restaurant might want to do a “3-Course Meal for $49”. You can use John Taffer’s method of identifying that it’s a gift card. You put down a “blue napkin”. The whole staff know it’s a gift card. You go above and beyond to deliver an amazing experience. The food is delivered fast.

Gary Vee and John Taffer talking about retention:

At the end of the meal, the manager comes over and makes sure everything went great and offers a special on their next visit with a coupon.

Using Pricing Anchors

While most of the time, our customers want to buy packages as gift cards, some still want to buy just a dollar amount. We use two types of pages for our Gift Card Checkouts. The first is the specific package they want to buy. The second is a generic page that we can use to sell generic dollar amounts (in our case $75, $150 and $300).

The prices you pick influence the actual dollar amount the customer is going to buy. If you put prices up $5, $10 and $15 — most customers won’t ask, “Do you sell a $50 gift card?”

Then again, if you sell every gift card from $5 to $500, in $5 increments, the customer is going to have a choice overload and probably pick something towards the bottom.

Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know But Can Learn From

There’s an excellent article on the effect of a pricing anchor. When we created our pricing choices for our gift card, we choose one really high card value and two that are closer to each other. The result is that the majority of our purchases are the middle pricing option.

Make It Easy to Buy Gift Cards

Include a Link in Your Header

Customers are not going to search your entire site to see if you sell gift cards. They want to know right off the bat. Just like you might have links to jobs and careers, you should have a Gift Card link to at least one type of gift card right off the bat.

Go Above And Beyond With Your Links

When you come to our site, you will notice every service menu item has a second link right after “Book Now”. The second link is “Buy as a Gift”.

We make it super easy for the customer to select the package they want to treat someone to. Not only that, but they also are constantly reminded that we sell gift certificates.

Test Your Platform

When picking a platform for your gift cards, it’s absolutely imperative that you test the purchasing path yourself.

When we used our Appointment Reservation system to process our gift cards, we didn’t sell many gift cards. While their platform is amazing at managing reservations, it wasn’t designed for the details around selling gift cards.

It’s a two-page checkout though that includes every possible option to purchase the gift card directly through their page. The complexity of it reduces the overall purchases.

Make It Simple for Your Customer to Buy

Last year, when we did our full website rebuild, we had a custom platform built and implemented into our system to create a super smooth and easy checkout system. Since then, we have sold an additional $15,000 in gift cards compared year over year.

Gift Card Season is 101 Days Away — Here’s Your Action Plan

In the first two weeks of May, I sold almost $4,000 in gift cards for Mother’s Day. The scary thing is, that’s still only 25% of the volume that you are going to do during December!

60–100 Days Out

Start Crafting Packages and Offers

Right now, you need to start preparing your business on which packages you are going to sell. As we have already talked about, people love treating people to experiences. That also means they are willing to spend a little more to get a little more.

We sell robes at the spa. Do you know that 90% of our robe sales are tied to our three major holidays? It’s because we increase our prices and include them in our packages.

This past Mother’s Day, we took our already popular two-hour package, added a robe in and increased the price accordingly. There was no problem selling these increased value packages. In fact, 90% of all the robes we sell are for our three major holidays.

Knock-’em-dead offers

If you are running out of ideas on what are popular packages, start using tools like Groupon and LivingSocial. While you do not want to copy their prices, you can use them as a research tool to discover what packages are hot and trending.

During Black Friday, we would do various types of promotions —

“Buy 3, Get 1 Free”

“25% Off If You Buy Over $100 in Products”

A lot of these people were already asking if they could buy them as gifts.

Black Friday -> Christmas transition

One of the biggest things about selling gift cards well is capturing that transition. For the two weeks leading up to Black Friday, you want to strategically plan ads that fit that shopping day.

Once Black Friday is done, you want to immediately transition into promoting your Christmas Specials. This is why it’s very imperative to have a well laid-out plan, so you can make the transition smoothly.

Pro tip: Depending on how deep you discounted and the popularity of the gift cards, you may want to consider doing an “Extended Promotion — Gift Card Sale!”.

60 Days Out — Start Planting Seeds and Distribution

Build Dedicated Pages for Your Offers With Simple Checkout

Every successful campaign requires a dedicated page for each offer. You want to sell the feeling of that package. You want to make the page easy and simple. We use a one-page and Stripe for our system.

You are going to use the landing page for all your promotional material online. For all your Facebook promotions, your newsletters, etc.

There are many articles on how to do single-product checkout. Ours is a form with a Stripe gateway behind it. We capture the most important information: To, From, Design, Note, the Package. We let Stripe handle the processing, and we send the gift through the emails.

You can also look at some pre-built solutions as well.

Email campaigns and social media

Last year, the very first email I got about Christmas from Groupon was on September 17th.

On my Facebook feed, I have already started to see “Days till Xmas” countdowns.

The sooner and earlier you start to plant seeds into your customer that you will have gift certificates, gift baskets and packages available, the better.

Here are some of the emails that I have sent with success:

2016 Holiday Gift Guide (11/15)

The Insider’s Secret Black Friday Spa Specials (10/31)

Running out of time for a gift? Grab yours today online. (12/21)

Overall, I will send roughly eight to 12 emails between October and November to all my customers to promote the gift cards that I sell.

In-store flyers and A-frame

If you run any type of brick and mortar, you absolutely need to promote that you sell gift cards anywhere and everywhere you can. Do not hold back. Within our spa, we distribute flyers. We leave our upcoming promotions flyer out right by the magazine.

We use flyer stands and have them at checkout, in the bathrooms and by the product.

We create a beautiful A-frame that goes out in front our store. We decorate it with festive colored balloon so it catches the eye.

We even update our window cling to show that we sell gift cards!

The more seeds you plant into your customers, the more likely they will come back and buy. Think about Black Friday. No one wakes up and goes, “Hey, today I am going to buy this!”. No, they already know what they are going to buy seven-plus days out.

AdWords

People still use Google to find gifts. They will type in things on where to buy them gifts, what to buy people, and so on. This campaign doesn’t need to be very elaborate because quite frankly, if you are in the local space, it’s easy to beat your competition.

You will then send them to that pre-built landing page you have already designed for an easy online purchase. Guess what your competition isn’t doing? They are taking shortcuts and hoping the customer figures it out.

Last Two Weeks

Every time someone is checking out — “Were you interested in any of our Gift Card Packages?”

If your staff hear people are saying keywords like they have family in town, or that they are visiting — “Hey, I’m not sure you know, but we do have some really cool gift cards available during the Holidays.”

Help your customers out — don’t let them try to figure it out themselves. If someone needs help buying a gift card, just simply walk them through it. All too often, I see businesses be like, “Yup just go online and buy it”. Out of the hundred times I hear that, maybe two will buy it actually.

Final Pro Tip

Optimize your website, your social profiles like Facebook and Yelp to include the fact you sell gift cards. We don’t rank for any of main categories #1, but we do for gift cards. Guess what happens when someone in my city is looking for gift cards? They come to me.

]]>Has anyone ever bought a McDonald’s hamburger because they wanted the pickle?

According to McDonald’s – the company sells 225,000,000 burgers worldwide each year. 75 per second!

At 10 seconds per pickle per burger for producing, transporting, managing and serving the pickle – that’s up to 71 years of peoples lives wasted (per year) on McDonald’s pickle habit. (A lifetime wasted every year!)

At 5 cents per pickle to produce, transport, manage and serve – that’s $11.25m of pickle expenses per year.

And why?

All so picky-eating pickle-flickers and flick their floppy pickles onto McDonalds’ clean windows.

If McDonald’s removed the pickle – I doubt there’d be protests in the street, with millions of pickle-munchers shouting “Bring back The Pickle!”

In fact, I doubt McDonald’s would see their sales suffer at all.

I reckon those pickle-munchers are fickle-pickle-munchers. They’d still buy the burgers anyway – pickle or not.

And McDonald’s would save millions of dollars – and decades of wasted time – each year.

The Price To Be Paid is Bigger Than We Often Think

Every feature you offer comes at a cost.

Not just a financial cost – but a cost of effort, a cost of attention, and a cost of positioning too.

It’s easy to ignore the cost of providing a feature when you’re so focussed on marketing and sales.

After all, it’s always a great idea to “value-stack” and “over-deliver” and offer your customers more and more if you’re concentrating solely on the sale!

But at some point, it pays to look at your products and offerings under the harsh light of their cost.

And this could lead you to retire entire products – or product offerings.

Burning Money with Jet-Fuel

Recently, American Airlines retired their SkyMall catalogues – perhaps the most well-known magazine in the sky!

Ignoring the time and labour cost of providing the magazine and placing it within reach of every seat of every plane – or the costs of producing and printing – just flying around with tonnes of printed magazines was estimated to be costing the company $350,000 per year in fuel costs alone.

When examined under this light – American Airlines made the ruthlessly practical decision to stop printing its SkyMall catalogue permanently.

REAL vs IMAGINARY Wants and Needs

Similarly, you can retire a single uneconomical (or marginal) feature of a product, service or offering.

The reality of all products and services is that there’s a very narrow band of core features that directly provide the outcome the customer is looking for.

McDonald’s burgers, for example, aren’t about the pickles. Or the burgers. They’re about the customer’s need for hunger-satisfaction and convenience outcomes. McDonald’s could have easily addressed these needs for convenience and hunger-satisfaction with fried chicken (as KFC did), or home-delivered pizza (as Domino’s did).

Beyond the narrow band of features that address the core outcomes customers need to address – there are the features that you (as the business owner) BELIEVES the customer wants…

…And the features that the customer ACTUALLY wants.

Often, there’s less intersection between what the customer wants, the customer needs, and you believe they want than you’d think. Even when asking customers what they want! (As Henry Ford once quipped, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”)

Yet each one of the features you provide that do not necessarily fit what the customer wants AND needs in order to achieve the real and desired outcome has a cost to provide.

The Quick Way to 10% Better Margins

If we’re looking at improving Margins by 10% within the 7 Levers structure – the easiest and most effective way to do this is to look for features and offerings that cost a lot – but do not deliver a lot of value to the customer.

This value could be either in the utility they provide in achieving the outcome, in their utility in attracting the customer’s attention and desire for what you sell, and/or in the offering’s financial value to you and your business and the direct profit margin it delivers.

And the cost needs to account for the real financial cost of providing the offering – as well as the opportunity cost of providing the offering instead of focussing on other areas of your business, or other offerings.

(Taking into account the opportunity cost, you’ll quickly discover that even marginally-profitable offerings might not be worth your time – when you could be focussing on much more profitable opportunities in your business.)

“But Brent! I don’t want to upset my customers!”

You won’t. If you do this effectively.

If the costly offerings or features that you provide aren’t valuable – your customers won’t miss them.

If you’re offering products or features at a loss or marginal profit – you’re not serving any valuable need anyway – and shouldn’t be too worried if those customers go to your competitors. (It’s win-win-win: You’ll get to deliver higher value outcomes and make bigger profits; your competitors will be happy to pick up your worthless crumbs; and the few customers you lose will be better served elsewhere anyway.)

And you don’t need to remove offerings from existing customers anyway. At least not initially. You can remove features in a staged rollout – and test the effect of removing them with new customers.

Achieving success in the Margin lever is all about being part ruthless cost-cutting bean-counter – and part customer evangelist, understanding and advocating for the true and deeper needs and desires your customers have most effectively and most sustainably.

And – like all of the 7 Levers – there’s a process for getting this right.

I’m a little saddened that you’re missing out – especially since you’ve been reading this short snippet of the type of insight you’ll get in the whitepaper, as you’ve read this email. However you know yourself better than I do – and know whether the whitepaper is right for you.

If you’d still like a copy of the whitepaper, this might be your final chance. Download a copy, have a flip through, and see if it’s something worth applying to your business. (I personally think it’s a hugely valuable concept – given it can very quickly and easily double your business profits.)

]]>http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/should-mcdonalds-kill-the-pickle/feed/0The Priceless Antiquehttp://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/the-priceless-antique/
http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/the-priceless-antique/#respondFri, 28 Apr 2017 21:42:11 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12661Have you seen Antiques Roadshow. Every episode, some little old lady brings in a old trinket that has been in their attic for decades gathering dust, and an expert in tweed reveals: “This is no ordinary dusty old trinket. It’s actually a priceless historical artifact” The Priceless Historical Artifacts in Your Business By far, the most valuable asset most businesses own is their past leads and customers. But most of the time, your most valuable asset is stored in the attic – gathering dust. Today – it’s time to climb up to the attic, dust off this priceless trinket, and

Every episode, some little old lady brings in a old trinket that has been in their attic for decades gathering dust, and an expert in tweed reveals:

“This is no ordinary dusty old trinket. It’s actually a priceless historical artifact”

The Priceless Historical Artifacts in Your Business

By far, the most valuable asset most businesses own is their past leads and customers.

But most of the time, your most valuable asset is stored in the attic – gathering dust.

Today – it’s time to climb up to the attic, dust off this priceless trinket, and put it in pride-of-place in your business. Because we’re going to make this asset shine!

The Irony of Advertising

Almost every business I’ve ever advised, consulted to (or occasionally owned!) has neglected their existing leads and clients.

They’re easy to overlook. They’re happy, quiet, and not buying right now.

“And damnit, I’m so busy with doing the work that I don’t have time to deal with them right now!”

But then we go out and pay money and spend time to attract new potential customers instead of fully engaging the ones we already have.

This is the irony of advertising.

So many businesses pay huge sums of money to attract new leads – only to neglect them.

“They’ll Tell ME When They Want To Buy”

Perhaps the expectation is that if customers wanted to buy, they’d approach us.

Often that isn’t the case.

How many times have you heard – or said – one of these…

“You were in the right place when I needed it!”,

“That’s just what I was after!”,

“Where have you been!? This solves the problem I’ve been battling for months!”,

“Oh yeah, I forgot you did that.”,

“Damnit – I should have ordered that earlier. Can you please rush that product to me because I now need it urgently?”

These comments are the tip of the iceberg – the few times we hear about how many sales we’re potentially missing because of lack of follow-up communication.

Sometimes They Don’t Realise They Already Have The Problem You Solve

Last week, I picked up a new student – simply because I had popped up at the time they had a particular problem in their business.

For the first time ever, this student realised that what I did actually addressed a deeper issue they had in their business.

They’d read one of my articles – and it spoke to the specific problem they were having in their business at the time – so they bought!

(This is a client who had previously been circling my business for years – and if I hadn’t been in regular contact with my leads, networks and past customers, I would have missed this sale.)

Sometimes They Need You To Offer Something Worth Buying

Another student was frustrated that he wasn’t getting paid better as a consultant.

Bills were coming in – he was working 12 hour days – but the work paid peanuts.

This is a guy who is at the top of his field. He’s immensely skilled and capable as a consultant – and his skills far outshone what he was getting paid a pittance to do. But none of his clients were asking him to do the kind of work he was truly capable of.

“Have you actually asked to be paid better?”

It turned out, no. He hadn’t.

It took a few minutes to develop an offer; a few days to contact all of his past clients to find out if they’re having problems in the area that his offering solved; and a week to increase his revenues by a solid 6-figure sum!

Do More

Throughout this series, I’ve encouraged you NOT to increase the amount of time, effort and money that you’re putting into your marketing – but instead, to focus your efforts better in each area.

The value of putting a little bit of effort into follow-up is so high that it’s the one area of business that is worth finding time to concentrate on.

Borrow from another area of your business. Any area. Few are going to be as valuable as spending some time concentrating on the “Transaction Frequency” lever, and boosting your repeat sales.

But I’d encourage you to do this in a leveraged way.

Buckets vs Pipeline

This is the difference between fetching buckets of water from the well – and building a pipeline that will bring the water to you.

Start by thinking about how you’d communicate with one lead directly.

What would you say to them?

Would you share an interesting article that you read?

Would you share interesting story about a similar business dealing with a similar problem?

Would you share an insight, or piece of information with them?

Would you invite them to a meeting or event?

Would you wish them a happy birthday?

Would you ask them about the issue they got in touch with you about?

Would you simply follow up about a quote, or solution, you provided?

Would you thank them for being a customer?

How would you interact with this person one-to-one if they were in-front of you right now?

This is “bucket” thinking.

Turn Your Bucket Into A Pipeline

Now, let’s turn your bucket into a pipeline.

How could you leverage that communication – and instead of saying it once, saying it thousands of times?

Would you script it, and make it part of your sales process?

Would you send it via a text message?

Would you send it via email?

Would you put a note in your diary to get in touch via phone?

Would you send a letter?

Would you send a gift?

The Marketing Miracle Under Your Nose

Modern marketing automation systems are a miracle of technology – every bit as revolutionary as the steam engine, production line, electronic eye, and robotic assembly… Except applied to the revenue generating side of your business.

But most businesses haven’t realised how powerful these tools can be.

The idea of simply automating some of the logical and daily interactions a “perfect salesperson” might have with your existing leads or customers is never considered.

It’s the source of a hugely valuable advantage you can establish in your market, over your competitors.

It’s a force-multiplier for your salesforce – allowing one salesman to have the effect of hundreds, perhaps thousands of customer interactions per day.

]]>http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/the-priceless-antique/feed/0How Much Should You Charge?http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/how-much-should-you-charge/
http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/how-much-should-you-charge/#commentsWed, 26 Apr 2017 21:41:11 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12660How much should you charge for your products and services? A little more than you are now – and perhaps you’ll make bigger margins, and increase your profits? A little less than you are now – and perhaps you’ll make more sales, and increase your profits? Whole PhDs have been dedicated to finding the best and most profitable price to sell an item for. Economists have scratched their heads, and decided it’s about “supply and demand” – although there continues to be debate around even that! Psychologists have developed theories on utility, and needs, and desire, and perceived value to

A little more than you are now – and perhaps you’ll make bigger margins, and increase your profits?

A little less than you are now – and perhaps you’ll make more sales, and increase your profits?

Whole PhDs have been dedicated to finding the best and most profitable price to sell an item for.

Economists have scratched their heads, and decided it’s about “supply and demand” – although there continues to be debate around even that!

Psychologists have developed theories on utility, and needs, and desire, and perceived value to explain how prices are driven.

Mathematicians have developed entire fields of study – like ‘game theory’ – to predict and measure the effect and impact of actions in a market.

Forget about the meaning of life!…

…It seems like more of the worlds’ smart people have dedicated their lives to unlocking the mysteries of pricing strategy than almost any other mystery.

I can understand why…

It’s all about how we value ourselves – and how others value us too.

Money is all about the value society places on something. If we can charge more, we must be worth more. And that’s perhaps the clearest signal of our status in society.

The Bigger Upside

Almost universally, I believe people undervalue themselves, and charge too little for products and services.

And I believe there’s far more room for financial improvement around profit in increasing prices than reducing them.

For those reasons, let’s avoid the “Voodoo Economics” of reducing prices to increase profits – and start raising prices.

Simple Raises

The easiest way to increase prices is to simply decide to increase them.

It’s scary – but the fear is only temporary.

A year ago a student of mine dug his heels in about applying this strategy.

“There’s no way our customers will pay more than $8,000 for our product.”

Since then, he’s made no mention of reducing his price back from $9,990 – a ~25% increase! The market proved it was willing to accept the new higher price, and his confidence in this price followed.

Simple Raises to Market Segments

If you’re worried about how existing customers will react if you raise your prices – don’t tell them yet.

Instead, raise your prices for new customers only.

Or for a particular industry segment.

Or for a single type of product to begin with.

How BIG Should The Raise Be?

Since we’re aiming for “10% wins” in the 7 Levers process, a 10% increase in prices is a good place to begin testing.

In most cases I’ve seen outside of highly competitive or commoditised markets, a 10% increase in prices results in no discernible decrease in customers – so 10% higher prices instantly increases profits by 10%.

You can always increase them by more than 10%.

“Sales Warlord” Gulliver Giles once said to me – “If you’re comfortable increasing your prices by $X, you should increase them by more – until you start to sweat a little.”

Worst case scenario, you’re going to bring your prices down – or better yet, increase the value of your offer so that it supports your new price point.

Sit Below Price Resistance

Be careful around psychological price resistance points.

Despite hovering around 99 cents for months, when fuel prices passed through $1 per litre in Australia, it made headline news.

When it passed through $1.10 per litre shortly after, it barely raised a whisper.

Certain prices evoke psychological resistance. Typically, it’s when the number at the front increases to a 1, 2, 5, or 7. (This is the reason why you see prices at $49, but rarely $50 – or $999 but rarely $1,000.)

So, as you increase prices, try to sit your price slightly below a psychological price resistance level (even if it means increasing it slightly to the next price resistance level point).

Spearhead Approach

There’s one other powerful strategy that I want to share with you – the Spearhead Approach.

This approach gives the customer the option of paying more – or down-selling themselves to a lower priced option.

]]>http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/how-much-should-you-charge/feed/1Borrowing from Peter to Pay Paulhttp://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/borrowing-from-peter-to-pay-paul/
http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/borrowing-from-peter-to-pay-paul/#respondMon, 24 Apr 2017 21:40:02 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12659Upsells, add-ons, cross-sells, support packages, insurance – they can all substantially increase your revenue and profit. And that’s what we’re trying to do in this email series – increase your profits! But improving the Items-Per-Sale lever is perhaps the hardest of all of the 7 Levers to improve. Not because it’s physically difficult (it’s not); or that it takes a big investment of money or time (it doesn’t – it only requires you to change how you interact with existing clients). It’s difficult because it requires a lot of thinking. And unless you’ve done it 100’s of times before (or

]]>http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/borrowing-from-peter-to-pay-paul/feed/0Here’s Why My Stuff Sellshttp://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/heres-why-my-stuff-sells/
http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/heres-why-my-stuff-sells/#respondSat, 22 Apr 2017 21:38:44 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12658Today, let’s get right down to brass tacks. In the next 3-5 minutes (depending on how fast you read), I’m going to give you the distilled essence of an incredibly powerful sales formula. This sales formula is the the reason I’m able to go into a business and immediately help even the most experienced and knowledgeable sales team to get better sales… Let’s Get Some Big Sales Results – Fast! If you want to increase sales, there are three key strategies Improve your offer. Increase your frequency of offering it. Improve your base product. The latter two steps – increasing

In the next 3-5 minutes (depending on how fast you read), I’m going to give you the distilled essence of an incredibly powerful sales formula.

This sales formula is the the reason I’m able to go into a business and immediately help even the most experienced and knowledgeable sales team to get better sales…

Let’s Get Some Big Sales Results – Fast!

If you want to increase sales, there are three key strategies

Improve your offer.

Increase your frequency of offering it.

Improve your base product.

The latter two steps – increasing the frequency that you make your offer, and improving your product – take time and effort to implement.

But an improvement to your offer can be planned-out in an afternoon, implemented the next day, and result in a lifetime of increased sales.

Note: It’s worth coming back to the this process again when – and working on improving the percentage of “Prospects” who turn into “Converts” using the other two strategies I’ve outlined above – improving your product, and offer frequency.

(This is a big reason to repeat the entire 7 Levers process several times – to keep improving your profits.)

But for today, focussing on improving your sales offer is typically the fastest and most effective action to take.

The Keys to Effective Sales Offers

There are 3 elements to an incredibly effective sales offer:

Value

Uniqueness

Scarcity

Every incredible offer throughout history has taken at least one of these three elements, and pushed it as far as it would go.

1. Value

Value is all about what’s-in-it-for-me (WIIFM).

WIIFM should always relate to some kind of currency: Time, Money or Effort.

“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” (time + effort)

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” (effort)

The strength of these offers built multi-million, or in come cases multi-billion dollar empires.

And they all worked because they demonstrated a clear return-on-investment for the buyer.

2. Competitive Uniqueness

Driving any distance through the centre of Australia, you see some tiny towns – with a single pub, single fuel station, and single general store – and nothing else around for hundreds of kilometres.

If you’re fortunate to own one of these businesses (perhaps all three), you probably don’t need to worry about marketing. Since there is no competition, the chance of a customer choosing a competitor’s business over yours are extremely low.

But for everyone else, it’s worth carving out a strong and unique competitive offer of your own. A reason for customers to choose your business over competitors.

Eli Goldratt, author of “It’s Not Luck” and “The Theory of Constraints”, refers to this type of competitive uniqueness as a “Mafia Offer”.

Part of a Mafia Offer is “making an offer they can’t refuse”.

But there needs to be something sustainable about your offer too. Something your competitors simply cannot match, or are unwilling to match – at least in the near future.

Ideally it should AVOID competing on price. If your goal is to increase your profitability, creating a price-war is counter-productive.

Instead, focus on magnifying a key feature the customer values most; magnifying a key capability you have (or could have) compared to the competition; magnifying the impact or outcomes you can create for your customers; or reversing the risk or issue that you need to overcome in order to make sales.

Dominos

To take an example from above, Domino’s famous offer – “Your pizza in 30 minutes – or it’s free” – is a great example of an offer Domino’s could make, but competitors were unwilling to match. And it works because it focuses on a key feature the customer values.

Hyundai

In 2009, Hyundai USA’s new-car sales stalled by the Global Financial Crisis. As a result, their finance arm made a risk-reducing offer: “We will buy back your new car if you get laid off in the next two years.”

Hyundai’s offer focussed on reversing the risk of financial stress (a key sales objection car sales people were facing industry-wide). It was a highly successful offer – but because it wasn’t a particularly unique competitive offer, competitors eventually (albeit reluctantly) copied Hyundai.

Even so, it did see Hyundai’s sales up 4.9% in 2009 – compared with a 40% drop in car sales overall.

Tesla

More recently, Tesla is changing the automobile industry by offering a unique and powerful luxury supercar to the environmentally-conscious (a unique set of features that no large carmaker is able to compete with right now).

Their cars have become a mix between an environmental statement, and status symbol – and can sell for more used than new, as sales have outstripped Tesla’s ability to deliver in a timely manner.

3. Scarcity

Most people don’t realise – but there aren’t just two decisions a customer can make when presented with an offer (“Yes”, or “No”).

There are actually three possible decisions: “Yes”, “No”, or “I’m going to delay making a decision”.

The value of a scarce offer is it pushes the “Delay” decision towards “Yes” – through fear-of-missing-out (FOMO).

Because of this, scarcity is one of the most powerful marketing tactics available – especially when working in a B2C market, or a B2B market with fast-acting decision-makers. (Although it’s much harder to create in highly bureaucratic and slower-moving B2B and government-sales markets.)

Price and Trial Scarcity

When launching Market Samurai (my keyword research and SEO analysis software app, and first foray into the startup world), I used a two-step scarcity.

Firstly, scarcity around a special discount offer expiring on Day 7. Secondly, scarcity around the customer’s software trial expiring on Day 14.

These two points of scarcity led to huge influxes of sales – and accounted for the majority of all revenue.

Supply Scarcity

Availability scarcity also helps too. Amazon will advertise “Only 2 left in-stock” against items with limited stock. Booking.com advertises “In high demand – only 3 rooms left at this price!”

And a colleague recently noted that their home-builder informed them “If we get these contracts signed this week, we’ll be able to schedule construction to begin before June.”

Such clever use of scarcity by a big builder that I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was all part of the sales process.

Putting it all in practice

There are 3 elements to an incredibly effective sales offer:

Value

Uniqueness

Scarcity

By amplifying your offer in one – two – or possibly three of these areas, the most likely outcome you’ll experience is a significant increase in sales.

If you can find several ways to frame your offer around these three elements to test, our experience has shown that one of these offers will stand head-and-shoulders above the rest in the sales impact it creates.

This won’t just mean a brief up-tick in the number of sales you create. An afternoon of work today could lead to a lifetime of increased sales starting tomorrow.

]]>http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/heres-why-my-stuff-sells/feed/0Smelly Cheesehttp://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/smelly-cheese/
http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/smelly-cheese/#respondThu, 20 Apr 2017 21:36:40 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12657Have you seen Jeremy Piven in the TV series – Mr Selfridge? It follows the story of Harry Gordon Selfridge – the revolutionary retail magnate who changed the face of shopping, and ushered in the era of department stores. The Red Gloves Scene There’s a great scene in the series involving a red pair of womens’ gloves – with Jeremy Piven’s character firmly-yet-politely demanding that they remain on-display and accessible to all customers. It was a battle of wills – between a well-meaning shop clerk, and the owner himself. But Selfridge had a good reason for making this demand. Before

It follows the story of Harry Gordon Selfridge – the revolutionary retail magnate who changed the face of shopping, and ushered in the era of department stores.

The Red Gloves Scene

There’s a great scene in the series involving a red pair of womens’ gloves – with Jeremy Piven’s character firmly-yet-politely demanding that they remain on-display and accessible to all customers.

It was a battle of wills – between a well-meaning shop clerk, and the owner himself.

But Selfridge had a good reason for making this demand.

Before Selfridge, conventional retail wisdom was to put items behind counters, in display cases, or in boxes – only to be reached on-request.

Selfridge wanted to turn shopping from a chore into a leisure activity – building his department store in a model somewhat more like a theme park for consumer goods, than a traditional high-street shop.

And part of the theme park model was making goods visible and accessible.

This one “tweak” to the way retail worked had an unintended side-benefit…

Any time a consumer picked up an item, they immediately revealed their interest in purchasing. Salespeople quickly learned this was the signal to go in for the kill – with the words “Can I help you”.

It was a sales bonanza!

If we think of the sale in mousetrap terms – placing attractive items on display is like making sure the mousetrap is set with smelly cheese.

In a sea of potential customers (Suspects) visiting his store, Selfridge had discovered a way to identify the most-likely customers (Prospects).

And by identifying the the most valuable people for sales staff to invest time and effort into, Selfridge increased sales!

Where’s Your Smelly Cheese?

For the same reason as Harry Selfridge, it’s worth finding the particularly “smelly cheese” in your business.

(In the of the 7 Levers – Converts – we’ll be investing heavily into making the sale. So it will be helpful to know you’re focussing your sales investment on the RIGHT potential customers.)

What Cheese Do You Use?

Finding the right cheese for customers in your business will depend on what you sell.

Just like in Selfridge’s stores, if you’re in retail – it could be picking up the shoes or red gloves on display. Or perhaps engaging with sales staff in a deeper and more meaningful way. (A particularly good example is The Athlete’s Foot stores’ Fitprint assessment – which helps to match your foot and gait to the right shoe.)

If you’re in B2B or the service sector instead of retail, you might need to “manufacture” some cheese – like an ebook, buyers guide, downloadable course or whitepaper.

You Don’t Need To Hit a Home-Run on your First Attempt…

Experiment with offers – or even survey prospective customers on what they want from you.

In the same way that you might try different baits or lures on a fishing hook – or different baits on a mousetrap – it will likely take several tries to find a particularly effective “cheese” for your business.

Let the numbers decide if you’re on the right track. The more Prospects it draws from your sea of Suspects – and the more sales Converts it creates – the better your cheese is.

Traits of Great Cheese

If you’re “manufacturing cheese” – with ebooks, whitepapers, buyers guides, our downloadable courses – there’s an effective structure that can work for you.

These are the traits of great cheese:

Low Investment – ideally free, fast, and easy to access. No mousetrap requires a mouse to jump through hoops before giving him access to the cheese.

High Engagement – the cheese should be smelly, tasty and visually-appealing. It should be something that your prospective customers want to engage with – on a deeper-than-superficial level.

Curiosity Entry – engaging a Prospect’s sense of curiosity is a great place to begin. If there’s a gadget, feature or insight you can tempt them with, it goes a long way.

Value Middle – the worst thing you can do is leave potential customers feeling “cheated” with the cheese you give them. Good cheese is about building a relationship, and trust, with a client – before you make the sale.

Unfinished End – although you want to give value, there needs to be something left unfinished, and a reason to buy after the Prospect has enjoyed the cheese.

Points Towards the Sale – following on from the above point, the cheese should point the Prospect towards the sale – and be a logical bridge over the gap between entering your store/visiting your website, and becoming a customer.

Need Help Making Cheese?

Pete and I have built our careers on making particularly successful, particularly smelly cheese for years – and have become artisan fromagerie cheesemakers.

]]>http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/smelly-cheese/feed/0Aim For The Bullseye, Not The Targethttp://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/aim-for-the-bullseye-not-the-target/
http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/aim-for-the-bullseye-not-the-target/#respondTue, 18 Apr 2017 21:36:27 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12655Every business owner wants to make more sales. And the logical way to do this is to run more ads – to bring more people in the door of your business (the first of the 7 Levers – “Suspects”). Running more ads makes sense – to an extent. But Advertising Takes an Investment While advertising can make you more money (which can be spent to increase your capacity: time and effort) – ads take attention (time and effort) and money in order to be effective. There are only so many hours in the day to run more ads – only

And the logical way to do this is to run more ads – to bring more people in the door of your business (the first of the 7 Levers – “Suspects”).

Running more ads makes sense – to an extent.

But Advertising Takes an Investment

While advertising can make you more money (which can be spent to increase your capacity: time and effort) – ads take attention (time and effort) and money in order to be effective.

There are only so many hours in the day to run more ads – only so much attention you can give your ads over other business activities – and only so much money that you can redirect into your advertising budget.

So – at any point in time – there’s a limit to how much advertising you can run.

You might want to achieve 10x your existing sales – but investing 10x more time, effort or money into advertising is a whole different kettle of fish!

(If you’re reached a plateau in your business, you’ll understand this limitation most acutely. You might WANT to be spending more on ads, and investing more effort into sales, but you simply can’t find the capacity to do more.)

And then there’s the problem of FOCUS!

The more ads you run, the more thinly you spread your focus – and the less effective your ads become.

Less effective ads might bring a lot of new Suspects into your business (foot-traffic, phone calls, web-traffic, etc). But those Suspects are likely to cost more per-person; or be less qualified and less likely to buy from you.

It’s like aiming at the target – instead of the bulleye. By widening your focus, you might hit what you’re aiming for more often – but your true effectiveness will suffer.

So – if you’re after more potential customers – “running more ads” is a simple solution. But it’s not always an effective solution.

Getting MORE From LESS

Rather than looking to increase the amount of advertising you’re doing – how can you focus your the time, money and effort you invest into ads and get a far better result?

Let me explain what I mean…

Recently, a student of mine was spending big on marketing – to bring in as many potential customers (Suspects) as possible.

“Brent, we need more people into the top of the funnel!”“I’m worried… How are we going to get more people into the top of our funnel this month?”
“If we don’t get more people into the top of the funnel now – we’re going to pay for it in 2-3 months time when sales dry up.”

Because of this, they had their thumbs in just about every marketing pie you can imagine…

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

These days we can track and measure the effectiveness of ads with greater accuracy than ever before.

And after running the numbers, it was clear that the majority of the time, effort and money this student was investing into advertising was going to waste.

For example – they had over a dozen relationship-driven referral arrangements. And each of these referral relationships took time to foster and nurture. But most had resulted 2-or-fewer sales.

Meanwhile – LinkedIn and Magazine ads were successful at attracting leads – but the financial cost of running these ads meant they were running ads at a loss.

For this particular student, the most valuable ad channel was Facebook. In their market, Facebook leads were cheaper, more abundant, and easier to access than any other channel. And those potential customers were far more likely to buy than leads from any other channel.

What’s more – because their attention had been divided across so many different channels – they’d never invested enough time, effort or money into Facebook ads to reap the full potential benefit of this one channel.

“Put It All On Black!”

It’s a scary leap for a business owner to cut off all other advertising channels – and focus on their most effective source of leads.

You can always go back to these less-effective channels later. (In fact, once you’ve optimized your sales process, and tapped-out the full potential of your MOST effective advertising channels – you’ll definitely want to return to some of these other channels. At that point, those less effective channels will be far more profitable than they’ve ever been for you!)

Instead of being risky – taking a coldly fact-driven approach to your marketing is about being smart and calculated.

And for making this leap, this student was vindicated.

The Benefit of Focus…

By taking the leap, this student’s ad costs dropped substantially. Instantly, their cost-per-lead dropped to around 1/3rd as much – which meant they could invest the same amount of money and get 3x as many leads.

In fact, they’ve just finished a nation-wide sales event tour, and it’s been the most well-attended series of events they’ve held in a long time – thanks in large part to the huge number of leads they attracted a few months ago.

]]>http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/aim-for-the-bullseye-not-the-target/feed/0The Domino Experiment: From One to Two Billionhttp://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/the-domino-experiment-from-one-to-two-billion/
http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/the-domino-experiment-from-one-to-two-billion/#respondFri, 14 Apr 2017 21:33:39 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12654I love weird science experiments… And Professor Stephen Morris is a Canadian physicist with a weird collection of dominoes. The first domino is smaller than a Tic Tac – just 5mm by 1mm. (This domino is so small that Dr Morris has to place it with tweezers.) The rest of Professor Morris’s dominoes increase in size – with the 13th sitting as high as his chest – and weighing around 100lbs (45kgs). An Increase of Two Billion Times The Force… Lining the dominoes up in order, he lets the tiny Tic Tac domino tip gently over – pushing down the

And Professor Stephen Morris is a Canadian physicist with a weird collection of dominoes.

The first domino is smaller than a Tic Tac – just 5mm by 1mm.

(This domino is so small that Dr Morris has to place it with tweezers.)

The rest of Professor Morris’s dominoes increase in size – with the 13th sitting as high as his chest – and weighing around 100lbs (45kgs).

An Increase of Two Billion Times The Force…

Lining the dominoes up in order, he lets the tiny Tic Tac domino tip gently over – pushing down the larger second, then even larger third domino – all the way to the largest 13th – which comes thundering down with a crash!

It’s an impressive demonstration of “domino magnification” – the compounding effect of physical force you can achieve with different sized dominoes.

In fact, the force from the 13th domino falling is TWO BILLION TIMES the initial force from the first domino!

“If we had 29 dominoes, the last domino would be as tall as the Empire State Building!” Dr Morris reveals with a grin.

Einstein was right.

The most powerful force in the universe IS compounding.

We see it in physics – and the example above, where force can be multiplied 2 billion times over a series of 13 steps.

And we see it in finance – where a bank can receive back more than double the initial capital loaned in the form of interest, when interest is charged regularly.

But Compounding Isn’t Just For Bankers and Physicists

It’s possible to achieve compounding effects in business too.

You just need to look for these 3 traits:

1. You Need a Series of Steps

The first thing you need is a series of steps – with each step building on the previous.

You have one domino pushing on another, then another, then another. Or one magnifying glass, magnifying through another, then another. Or one interest charge, charging interest on another, charging interest on another.

In business, marketing is one unique area where you can find the series of steps necessary to achieve a compounding effect.

An improvement in just one of the 7 Levers areas will flow onto all the steps that follow – leading to a slight increase in profits.

But an improvement in ALL of the 7 Levers areas will result in a compounded increase in profits.

2. The Bigger Any Improvement Is, The Better

Professor Morris’s experiment sees his dominoes grow in scale so quickly because each domino is roughly 1.5x higher than the one before.

But – in marketing – we don’t need to be constrained by 1.5x improvements.

In the 7 Levers process, we aim to achieve at least 10% improvements in each of the 7 Levers areas. This is a modest improvement that almost any business will be able to achieve, without too much sweat. And if all you did was achieve 10% improvements across all of the 7 Levers, you’d achieve a near-doubling of profits.

But if you were to achieve more than this – say a 40% improvement – you wouldn’t just double profits. You’d end up with 10x the profits you had before!

3. The Earlier You Begin, The Better

As any retirement planner will tell you: the sooner you begin, the better-off you’ll be.

Compounding takes time. And the more time you give something to compound, the bigger the effect will be.

]]>http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/the-domino-experiment-from-one-to-two-billion/feed/0Could You Lift the Entire Earth?http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/could-you-lift-the-entire-earth/
http://preneurmarketing.com/7-levers/could-you-lift-the-entire-earth/#respondWed, 12 Apr 2017 21:30:43 +0000http://preneurmarketing.com/?p=12653Archimedes – one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived – once proclaimed: “Give me a large enough lever, and a place to stand, and I can lift the entire Earth.” At the time, he must have sounded like a crazy person… …An old bearded dude claiming that – with nothing more than a stick and a hill – he could be as strong as Atlas. But he proved all his naysayers wrong. How? By single-handedly using leverage to launch a huge ship into the ocean – a feat that would have taken hundreds of men without leverage. It Was

]]>Archimedes – one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived – once proclaimed:

“Give me a large enough lever, and a place to stand, and I can lift the entire Earth.”

At the time, he must have sounded like a crazy person…

…An old bearded dude claiming that – with nothing more than a stick and a hill – he could be as strong as Atlas.

But he proved all his naysayers wrong.

How?

By single-handedly using leverage to launch a huge ship into the ocean – a feat that would have taken hundreds of men without leverage.

It Was An Idea That Changed The World

Archimedes had discovered that – through leverage – a little focussed effort could get many times the typical result.

This is where the term “business leverage” comes from. While we don’t see physical poles or “levers” in business leverage, the principles are the same…

…A little bit of time, effort, or money invested today provides more than its value back – in saved time, saved effort, saved costs, or gained profits.

The key is to find a point of leverage.

Who Was Smarter: Al Gore, or George W. Bush?

Al Gore has a reputation for having a colossal intellect. George W. Bush has a reputation for being a bit of a doofus at times.

But – as a campaigner – Bush knew the importance of leverage.

During the 2000 US presidential campaign, Al Gore famously boasted he had personally designed his campaign logo.

His opponent, George W. Bush, retorted “I didn’t.”

Instead, Bush got out of the way and focussed on policy and campaigning (the things that mattered, when it came to winning the presidency.)

Knowing that – is it any surprise who won the 2000 Presidential Election?

Overvaluing the Unimportant

As business owners and marketing managers, we tend to overvalue the unimportant – and ignore the things that truly matter.

It rarely matters if your logo is light blue or dark blue; or if your business name uses the word “professional” versus “expert”.

So stop splitting hairs on those things – and pour that wasted time and focus into the things that really matter!

What Really Matters?

Assuming business growth is important to you, here are the 7 things that matter:

Suspects – the number of people entering your store, or visiting your website.

Prospects – the percentage of suspects who enter the sales process (speaking with a sales assistant, opting into your lead generation offer, etc).

Converts – The percentage of prospects who open their wallets, and commit to purchasing from you. Your customers!

Items-Per-Sale – The average number of items a customer purchases in a single transaction.

Average Item Price – The average price of items purchased by customers.

Transactions per Customer – The number of repeat sales a customer makes (typically per year).

Margin – The profit margin on products or services sold.

There are the places where you get true leverage in your business: where a few hours of effort, a few dollars invested, or a few clever thoughts put into action can generate thousands – perhaps even millions.